


somebody out there

by Tyellas



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Drama, Gen, Max getting in other people's stories again, Max or everyone else, Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Mad Max: Fury Road, Pre-Mad Max: Fury Road, Psychological Horror, hard to know who was more crazy, how about the rest of the world, so HOW ABOUT those satellites
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-11 23:49:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9044507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: That's what you call a satellite. Miss Giddy told us about those…Do you think there’s still somebody out there? Sending shows? 
A road warrior stumbles on an enduring satellite base, and the missions and madness inside are a match for his own. What does it take to open the door to the apocalypse? The answer's in there. Under a tinfoil hat, tangled in a faded flag, inside the manual for the end of the world. If it's not too late - if there's still somebody out there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Something very different, both for me and as a Mad Max fic - and scroll to the end for a very different piece of fan art inspired by this!

“ _There’s somebody out there._ ”

The first time it happened, ten station staff showed up, cramming Packer's office, eyes glued to the security monitors.

Packer had tuned them all to show the station entrance. A low, black car had driven into their gorge, tracking the carefully smoothed sand. They watched as its driver emerged to slouch against his car, matching it in his black leather. Only one pauldron was left on his beat-up jacket. Packer thought he looked young. Unlike them, he’d been born to the nightmare out there. He tapped a sawn-off shotgun against his right thigh, eyes on the back of their dry gorge. The desert-camo stucco must have flaked off the vehicle door, in that storm a few weeks back. Packer didn’t like the compulsive tic in his jaw, nor his focus.

Packer shifted to let the chief probability analyst squirm through to the front. She said, “After all this time…Which way did he come from?”

“East.” Their visitor had driven out of the land they’d fled. The radioactive craters that had been Alice Springs, the satellite monitoring station that got Alice Springs nuked, the salt desert the Outback had become. He had driven through that God-forsaken wasteland to stumble on them, in the Gibson Desert hills – the _backup_ satellite monitoring station.

“Looks like he’s from some 80s metal band,” the probability analyst muttered. She ruffled her curly hair to wildness.

Parker turned his laugh into a cough and cast a guilty look at the station commander. Harrison was big on military protocol, for all that his uniform blues were fading in the post-nuclear sun. Worse, Harrison was brittle from a bad week. He’d hewed to form every time he’d asked if Utah was back on the air. Nobody could say yes. Based on the radio silence, the Utah base had collapsed like West Virginia and Colorado, on the other side of the world. Now, this.

It was sundown. As shadows fell across the driver, he leapt upright, slowed only by one bad knee. He stalked closer to the cameras, face filling the monitor: gaunt and stubbled, sand-matted hair and reddened, fixed eyes.

“What’s got him going?” growled Harrison.

“Uh, the security camera may have a light on it, sir. With some of the camo down, maybe he’s seen it.”

“He’s seen it, all right. And he knows what it is.”

The driver proved this by speaking. The intercom cracked and fuzzed his voice. “Anyone...anyone there? You’ve got a gate. Power. Anyone alive?” He waited. The driver lifted his weapon, gestured to his car. “My name...” Though their side of the intercom was on mute, nobody in the office breathed. The driver changed tack. "Once, I was MFP. Highway patrol. A cop." He stopped, expectant.

Packer glanced down at his own tarnishing badge: NSA POLICE ALICE SPRINGS AUSTRALIA. “Maybe that’s how he found us. Do we let him up? Sir.”

“Ants, what’s in the manual?”

Packer frowned. Antonia hated the nickname. Without looking, the probability analyst caught the heavy binder Packer passed her: _Joint Operation Protocols: Sat-Nav Stations, Global/Ancillary_. She sniped, “Is anyone taking minutes? Wouldn't want to violate protocol! This is section 19. Paragraph 12. External contact is formally discouraged unless the following crisis situations are in place. Paragraph 12-a: Loss of critical supplies including power generation, medical supplies, artesian well access. Paragraph 12-b…”

The intercom rustled, disturbed. The tension had snapped the driver. He was pacing and cursing. His voice cracked. “I crossed the Salt for this. I lived while you died. I CROSSED THE GODDAMN SALT –-" He turned aside and bashed a fist on the hood of his car. Packer winced at the man’s wracked gasps, between dry heaving and sobbing. Others were muttering.

Antonia closed the binder, crisply. “Sir. Chances are, he’s dehydrated. If we can talk to him, he’ll have information.”

Harrison turned on her. Two feet away, he shouted in her face,  “This place is nothing _but_ information. We are officially here to watch satellite networks and see who’s still civilized. Martinez let this place run down. He let you go off protocol hunting _kangaroos_ , having _kids_ , treating confidential radio channels like goddamn _Facebook_.” Harrison stabbed a finger at the monitor. “As your commanding officer I say that man is nothing. Nobody. Crazy. Feral. Some extra from the bad disaster movie going on out there. No contact. That’s an order.”

The silence from ten people was so leaden, it could block the Outback’s radioactivity for a hundred years. Packer shielded Antonia behind his salute. “Yessir.”

“Log it and call it in to the other stations.”

“Yessir.”

After Harrison lurched out, the others slunk away. Antonia lingered. “If it’s a bad postapocalyptic movie out there, we’re in it too. This has been building up for weeks. I’m going to try and talk sense to Har tomorrow.”

"He's on edge about Utah."

“He's also an asshole since he got command. My team's had it with him. Our visitor's the catalyst I needed." They'd been on-again, off-again long enough that Packer could see her turning inwards behind her glasses, calculating station dynamics in her mind. Her voice went, briefly, soft. "Come in when you’re done here? I could use...some grounding.”

Packer gave in to her, and himself. “Yep.”

"Thank you." She went, then turned back at the door, to heft up the protocol manual. "I'll see if there's anything useful in our instructions for the end of the world, here."

Her departure left Packer alone with the driver’s breakdown.

Packer settled in to wait with his trademark patience. Born to the desert, at eighteen, he had picked the military instead of the mission. After two years, there had been a nudge towards intelligence work. Psychometric testing plumbed the stable bedrock of him, found him perfect for another desert and a different mission. He was backing up an American satellite station in Australia as military police. The folks in Utah were thrilled. It had been a shame the security was so tight he could only mail postcards.

Then, the wars. The water wars, and the oil wars that led to double- and triple-time, and the final war. The satellite station had fulfilled its missile-detecting destiny and emptied out in the same hour. Packer’s black envelope had told him to join the convoy bugging out here, to the backup station. How long ago? Packer left it at decades. They were still there, monitoring satellites and radio signals.

For what it was worth. The airwaves were thinly populated, quieter every year. Post-nuclear EMP had socked out, as Antonia put it, “all the technology we liked using.” Radio gabble between settlements and loose-cannon military units dwindled over time. The seas, from a radio perspective, were dead. Just when it seemed they'd ridden out nuclear winter all right, something snapped in the Australian climate. There were forest fires big enough to show on the satellite views, then the desert sweeping over the black ashes. That was when most of the Aussie chatter had stopped.

Tonight, now that the driver outside had sunk to his knees in the sand, Packer began the dismal task of following orders. Antonia's side of the station nudged and monitored the satellites. His side, military security, had standard radio. He tried the few frequencies they could, by protocol, listen to or acknowledge.

He started wtih Guam. After their island's ground water failed, an attempted relocation had taken them to silence. Their frequency was static.

The first numbers station droned on. Packer gave its eerie digital voice a mere second.

West Virginia remained static. So did Colorado.

The second numbers station was doing its count. Again, Packer changed over fast. This voice wasn’t bad, a real-sounding woman, but _the music_ that split up her lists of numbers was the stuff of nightmares.

Utah was static, and it was morning, there. Packer gave its static a good long moment, thinking through his family’s names. He felt better about that than faking his way through a gospel he’d run from like a jack rabbit. Though he wondered, lately, if anything had been right of their prophecies and strangeness. They had said apocalypse was not an end, but an uncovering, a revelation.

It didn't look like that outside, The moon had risen to light the gully. The driver had collected himself enough to stand. He vanished from the camera’s view. The intercom transmitted a resounding crash, followed by thick Aussie curses. He must have given the revealed garage door a good kick. Packer saw him limp back to his car and drive off.  The leaden silence of the station following orders settled in Packer’s gut.

The last frequency was broken by a hint of voice. Someone was calling CQ, trying to find another radio operator. Packer tuned it in. 

“Aaaaaay! Call sign alpha-tango-alpha alpha-foxtrot-alpha-november! Over!" Packer replied with their call sign and asked for the name.

"Outta the one-thirty-seven humans and two million penguins of the United States of Antarctica, you're stuck with Toothfish Charlie. Who’ve I got? Over!” Packer’s name was greeted with an excited howl. “How’s it hangin’, Packer? Still packin’?”

“That’s not funny,” Packer said, smiling. “Yours frozen off yet? Uh, over.”

“Nope. Stay jealous. Where were ya? Having breakfast?”

“Not for seven hours. It’s the middle of the night.”

Charlie moaned. “I got the time zone wrong again, didn’t I?”

“You got the time wrong.”

“Sorry, man, sorry. It’s winter down here. Does our heads in, yanno? Welcome to McMurdo Asylum. I got the tinfoil hat on under the balaclava.”

"Always were a crazy guy, Charl." Packer cleared his throat. “I, uh, got an activity report.”

"You’re killing me, still with the reports. Whatcha got? A giant lizard? I love those.”

“Let me do the thing and then we’ll talk a bit. Uh, someone’s waiting for me.”

As Charlie howled again, Packer glanced at the monitors, in case. But nobody was out there.

* * *

“It’s not that there’s somebody out there, it’s that they found us. Connecting with them, it’s the last thing Mom wanted to do.”  As the last step of burying her mother, she set the small sandstone marker down on Antonia’s grave. “So I’ll be going.”

Packer looked at the subtle new graves, for seven original staff and three children. One good storm over the low heaps, and the desert would consume them. Harrison was where they’d all agreed to dump him, splayed out on a nearby rock outcrop, black with crows. “You know why we said Harrison went postal? It was from before all this, from America. Frustrated people doing a job, when it didn’t seem to mean anything, they’d lash out. Shoot lots of people where they worked.”

His daughter stamped her foot. “Dad, you are _changing_ the _subject_. You know what it means, that guy who made it here? There’s fuel out there. Gasoline. Some kind of civilization! We aren’t trapped in recharge range with the vehicles any more. We can find who's survived, swap for gas, go further out. See what’s out there now with our own eyes.”

“From what we get on radio and satellites, nothing.”

“We can’t stay here. This is crazy. Postal.” She looked him in the eye. “You showed me how to stay alive in the desert. Mom said she brought me up to be a scientist. I was born do to this! I need to know. More than anything. Isn’t that why we’re here?"

She’d been brought up on dehydrated TVP and leftover Disney, cautious starlight hikes and Liberty And Justice For All Within Station Protocol. She had his height and straightish hair, Antonia’s brilliant eyes and relentless mind, primed and impatient to make all the stories they’d told her come true. He could tell her it had been a lie, that they were hiding in the Gibson Desert out of faded hope and habit and because the Aussies knew damn well who’d started the nuclear war.

“You’re all gonna go?”

She almost shouted. “We need to!”

“I can’t stop you,” he admitted. He could, actually. But then he’d be the villain in their story, and ten graves had gone down for nothing. And his daughter wouldn’t be flinging her arms around him, thanking him, crazy with joy.

A day later, most of the second generation, and a few old-timers, had hurled themselves out there, following the driver’s tracks. The gray remainders still at the station were sorting out who was going to be in charge. Packer left them to it for what was left of his routine. He turned the radio antenna and pinged McMurdo.

After the grim update, Charlie kept him on call, shooting the shit. About his last Ross Sea fishing run, their countdown until the sun rose again, their insane parties fuelled by kelp rotgut. “Don’t hang up yet. You’ll make it weird, man. You try talking to Svalbard lately?”

“They're off our list. They quit speaking English.”

“Either they're out enjoyin' summer or they've ascended to Valhalla. Good luck to them.”

The idea of escape snarled Packer up about everything. Antonia, their daughter, the clean-up, the crows, the departing tracks in the gorge.

"Still there?"

Packer heard himself saying, “Wish we’d talked to that guy the other night. The driver.”

Charlie was interested. "Was he still speaking English or was it Aussie Clockwork Orange? All changed up? Maybe it would be like talking to an alien. We told them to come, yanno. The aliens.”

“Is that what your tinfoil hat told you?”

“We did! We sent ‘em that satellite with the picture saying there’s carbon-based life forms here, come visit. Yanno – the naked guy and the chick and some math – and one of them’s waving?”

“The Pioneer plaque.” That was the thing about Charlie. His tinfoil-hat stuff was usually right. That reminder helped Packer roll back his bad feeling about the expedition. By the time he’d talked Charlie through an Australian sunrise, Packer was able to sleep, and eat, and get on with the motions.

He kept watch, long after it was clear they weren’t coming back. There was something else to see. The crows, after being fed, were waiting for more. They came back for weeks. Months.

Years.

* * *

There was somebody out there. Again.

When the solo driver returned, Packer knew it was him. There was no forgetting the man whose visit had changed everything. He still had the one-pauldron jacket and the car.  Everything was more stripped-down and battered, like he'd gone through a war on the road out there. The driver, himself, was a human tumbleweed, his hair awful, slouched and weary. Packer was, too. The whole station was: his whole world.  

This time, the driver had a plan. He had approached as dusk fell. When he saw the camera’s light, he stepped up to it. Again, his face loomed close. His eyes had creased, downturned. “See you’ve, mmmm, still got the ‘lectricity on. Saw your…solar…panes.” He paused, like half-remembered instructions were coming back to him. “You military in there? Some science thing? Satellites? Sending shows?”

Packer’s brain froze. This was mad. That demolition derby hobo out there was telling him what they did in there.

He didn't say who he was, this time. Something else was more important. “Got someone you’ll want to talk to out here. Not me. Not here. They thought someone was out there. They want to know… There’s a...this group of women...I don’t mean it that way.” He turned away, jaw twitching like last time, shoulders hunching in.

Women? Who? A woman had died, because of this man: a girl had never returned from the silent plains.

Out there, the driver shook his head, seemed to turn to someone who wasn’t there. “Mmm. Hope....glory...I tried.” The haunted man was as crazy as he'd been last time.

Or was he?

Maybe he had an idea about what they did for a reason.

Maybe he had news.

The unanswered questions were frying the air like static. Packer weighed what to do, who to tell from the station’s thin numbers. He’d take it to the top, he decided. After Harrison’s one-man disciplinary action, they'd made the most senior remaining analyst the commanding officer. This hadn’t, in retrospect, gone as well as they’d hoped. But you couldn't say that Wingate was an unreasonable man.

Packer flicked open his old protocols manual, retrieved from Antonia's bedside after her death. She had scrawled her thoughts throughout it, that final night, before he'd come in. Some of her notes seemed about right for this night.

Feeling armed, with the binder tucked into his elbow, he made his way through the windowless corridors. He’d been coming up here less and less. The fluorescent lights, never turned off, had gone dim and greenish. Vast software servers, sealed behind identical doors, whined in electronic fever. He found Wingate's den, secure in the deepest back of the place.

“Sir. Have we changed the policy on external communication? It can be said that section 19 is contraindicated by section 132-A now that we’re past the 30-year point.”

Wingate’s hair was as white as the lab coat he clung to. His reply was slow, considered. “Have you noticed, the way the sun here consumes everything? Ozone layer degradation. Ultraviolet radiation. _The empire of the sun: I saw the atom bomb_ … Look at this. Just from being here, it's having a molecular breakdown.” He lifted a pile of fabric on his desk. Packer saw red stripes at its edges, bleeding out to bleached organ-pink in the middle. Wingate fingered the fabric like he searched its decaying folds for something he’d lost. Packer glimpsed a corner folded in, giving it a blue and starry heart. Wingate's questing fingers passed it by, despite its vividness. 

“But you're asking about the policy. I think there’s not a need. Not with the population crash. All the wavelengths keep telling us there’s little left, beyond us and the satellites. I’m having trouble seeing the urgency. I certainly wouldn’t want to risk our supplies which, based on all calculations, will see out our lives…” He angled towards Packer. His eyes were whitening, occluded with cataracts.

Packer heard himself mumbling, like the driver outside. “Mmmm. Sorry to trouble you. Have a good night, sir.” He sidled away, using the binder to cover what he'd lifted: a black folder packed with codes. Including the rotating codes for the triple-stacked outside doors. In the sickly corridor, he forced his stiff limbs into a gallop.

Too late. By the time he returned to the monitors, it was over. The driver was gone, again.

Charlie, caught on CQ, took it in stride. “Sounds like you’re hallucinating, my man. Seeing ghosts promising you what you want. We get them like that all winter.”

“Ghosts? Your people who’ve died?” It had been a while since Charlie gave a number for the population in Antarctica.

“Not just our ghosts. All of ‘em. I think they like being remembered, after the apocalypse and all. I saw my mom the other night, with the tablet I had as a kid. She was promising me screen time.” Charlie broke off for a hacking cough that set his microphone rumbling.

It was Packer's turn to check. “Still there? Not going ghost on me?”

“Nah, man.”

“It's your winter, isn't it.”

Charlie's laugh cracked through. “I wouldn't say it's _my_ winter. Ain't no man's winter out there. Dying time’s here…survive winter, once the sun’s back we’re… good?” Charlie paused. Packer was reminded of the driver, grasping for words that sounded sane. “Alive.”

* * *

Was there somebody out there?

Packer was goosing his radio. It took some work after the storms that now ripped across the desertified continent, wrecking reception and signal latency. The engineer who had taught him this had her grave, too, lost in the sands. Those who remained had taken on one task after another until Packer felt interchangeable, hot-swappable. His radio seemed to be back to normal, except for one thing. Packer did what he couldn’t stop doing: he tried McMurdo.

It was uninterrupted static.

Had they had a bad storm as well, extending the winter, their dying time? One too many wind turbines gone down? Somebody’d gone postal? He hoped it was as simple as Charlie getting the screen time he’d dreamed of. Ghosting out.

Packer tapped through more static.

One numbers station remained. Its girlish voice chanted prettily. Until it was time for _the music_ that broke up its number sets. Packer stayed still.

He’d thought listening to it once, picking up the hideous cheerful earworm of it, would drive McMurdo's static from his brain. But it only made everything worse.

To hear something else, anything else, he flipped open the manual, loudly. Riffling through its grimy pages took him to the last official procedure. _Annex 192-C: 45 Year/Final Guidelines._ Antonia had scrawled plenty of snark in the margins. She had also seized the last word, below the final laser-printed step: _192.C.3. May there be mercy on our souls._ The pair of them, when they'd been a pair, had agreed there were no atheists in foxholes, and no believers after nuclear war. Who, then, had she thought would have mercy?

A security beep cut through his fog. Packer swung to the now-solitary working monitor.

Someone was out there, in the red gorge.

It was the same car as before, tires so sagged it was close to merging with the sand. It had the same driver, recognizable by that pauldron, better off by a haircut and shave.

Packer reached to switch on the intercom - and stopped cold.

The driver had lumped out of the car and pointed right at the camera. But his eyes turned back to his ride.

He wasn’t alone.

The driver's companion stepped out of the car. This had to be one of the women he'd muttered about. No wonder the driver couldn't string a sentence together about her. She was terrible as an angel, a damned supersoldier with a puma's grace, legs sheathed in dusty leather, cradling a scoped rifle against her smooth right shoulder. The dusklight glinted on her left shoulder’s straps, attaching her fully articulated mechanical arm. Packer seized the monitor edges with both hands to swear, rejuvenated. “Holy freakin’ heck!" Antonia’s voice rang in his mind, or was it Charlie’s: _This one’s from a postapocalyptic movie with a budget._

In his waiting days, Packer had planned a hundred ways to deal with the driver, but he hadn't imagined this. Who were they? Mad man and killing machine? Or the Pioneer pair, beckoning from the alien place the world was now?

They were checking in with each other. The driver's rough mumble obscured his words. For all that the woman soldier’s eyes were hard, her voice was unexpectedly light and clear. “Once,” Packer heard her say. “One chance to deal.”

She turned to face the camera. Raised her metal hand.

Packer thumbed the intercom. “Stay where you are. I’m coming.”

He saw them startle. Something had gotten through. Packer bolted for the stairs, stolen codes in his hand. If they’d heard more than just static, it would be that mercy. If they’d wait a little longer, when he was late for their apocalypse already.

**Author's Note:**

> [sictransitgloriamundi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sictransitgloriamundi/pseuds/sictransitgloriamundi%22) (also girlfriendsofthegalaxy @ tumblr) created this page from the _Joint Operations Protocols._ Thank you! It's good to know what to do, especially in the event of an emu war!
> 
> I’m not going to tell you to Google “satellite station and Outback”. 
> 
> I’m certainly not going to tell you to Google “numbers stations” but if I was I’d tell you to do it during daylight. 
> 
> _The empire of the sun: I saw the atom bomb_ \- Wingate is quoting J.G. Ballard’s _Empire of the Sun._


End file.
